BTHX 5325 | Biomedical Ethics

Sept. 2 - Dec. 10

Fall 2025 Courses

Instructor:

Joel Wu, JD, MPH, MA, HEC-C

3 Cr

| Thursdays, 1 p.m. - 3:30 p.m.

| Remote: Online with live Zoom meetings

Fall Semester Registration:

For Degree or Certificate Programs: Opens Thursday, April 10

For Non-Degree & Visiting Students: Opens Friday, May 2

This course examines contemporary issues in bioethics, focusing on practical issues that arise in clinical care, public health, and health policy settings. The course also introduces conceptual frameworks and methods to analyze these issues, though the emphasis will be on challenges faced by patients and their loved ones, health professionals, and policy makers, not on ethical theory. To fully understand and evaluate these complex issues, it is critical that we consider them from a diversity of perspectives. Hence, we will spend most of our time in class discussion, openly and respectfully listening to and engaging with each other in interdisciplinary/interprofessional conversation. Class meetings will be fully online via Zoom; no in-person meetings will be required.

This course has been approved for Interprofessional Education (IPE) credit for health professions students.

Course Objectives
Upon completion of the course students should be able to:

Describe basic ethics concepts and values relevant to bioethics.
Identify and describe how ethics conflicts can arise and can be resolved in clinical care, research, and public health practice, with reference to certain cases as examples.
Systematically and clearly analyze ethics conflicts in biomedical contexts using established conceptual tools or frameworks, and informed by interpersonal/interprofessional discussion.
Propose and justify recommendations for action to resolve ethics conflicts that arise in a biomedical context.

About the Instructor:

Joel Wu, JD, MPH, MA, HEC-C, is a Center for Bioethics’ Clinical Ethics Assistant Professor and a senior lecturer in the Division of Health Policy and Management at the University of Minnesota’s School of Public Health. Professor Wu’s primary role is as a clinical ethicist for the MHealth Fairview system. He is a co-chair of the University of Minnesota Medical Center's Ethics Committee, co-lead for the clinical ethics consultation service for MHealth Fairview system hospitals, and member of the MHealth Fairview Ethics Council. Professor Wu also teaches courses at the intersection of clinical ethics, public health ethics, and public health law.

Previously, Professor Wu conducted health policy research and development at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine at the Institute of Medicine (now the National Academy of Medicine) where he served as a study director on the Board on the Health of Select Populations and the Board on Population Health and Public Health Practice. Professor Wu also worked as a research associate for the former Engelberg Center for Health Care Reform at the Brookings Institution and completed post-doctoral fellowships at the Program in Bioethics and Professionalism at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN, and in Clinical Ethics at Children's Minnesota and Abbott Northwestern Hospitals in Minneapolis, MN. Professor Wu holds a JD and an MA in Bioethics from Case Western Reserve University and an MPH in Epidemiology from the University of Minnesota.